Cuba reopens its borders to tourism | From November 15, the PCR will no longer be required to enter the country

The Ministry of Tourism Cuba announced on Monday that the country It will gradually reopen its borders to tourists from November 15 and it will, since then, eliminate the obligation to present PCR tests to enter the island. Flexibility, the portfolio explained, is possible thanks to the progress of the coronavirus vaccination campaign.

“To have the progress of the vaccination process in Cuba” and “its demonstrated effectiveness and the perspective that over 90% of the population will complete their immunization schedule in November, conditions are being prepared to gradually open the country’s borders from November 15, “the ministry said in a statement.

The conditions for entering Cuba

Current requirements for entering Cuba are similar to those applied by Argentina and other countries around the world: authorities require travelers to arrive with a negative PCR test, take another at the airport in upon arrival and then quarantined until the results of a third test five days later are available.

With the reopening of the borders scheduled for mid-November, however, “sanitary hygiene protocols will be relaxed on arrival of travelers, which will focus on monitoring symptomatic patients and taking temperature, ”announced the Ministry of Tourism.

As specified, the diagnostic tests They will be carried out randomly, the PCR will not be requested on arrival and the traveler’s vaccination certificate will be recognized.

Tourism, affected by the pandemic

Tourism, one of the main sources of foreign exchange for the Cuban government, has suffered a severe blow with the coronavirus pandemic, which since the end of March 2020 has forced the island to partially close its borders.

Between January and July, the country received 270,639 foreign visitors, only a quarter (21.8%) of those caught during the same period of 2020 (1,239,099).

Currently, the number of flights arriving in Cuba is very limited and only a few Russian and Canadian tourist charters arrive regularly in certain resorts in the country reserved for this purpose.

Deprived of foreign currency from tourism, the authorities drastically reduced imports, exacerbating the shortage of food and medicine.

Vaccination in Cuba

Cuba, which has developed its own vaccines against the coronavirus (Abdala and Soberana), currently has a third of its population vaccinated and hopes, by November, to have increased this coverage to 92.6% of the society.

The island, in the face of rising infections, has also launched a vaccination campaign for girls, boys and adolescents between the ages of two and 18, a measure it has imposed as a condition of schools reopening.

Cuban vaccines, for the moment not recognized by the WHO, are based on a recombinant protein, the same technique on which the American Novavax and the French Sanofi are working.

In recent months, the island has recorded the worst contagion data of the entire pandemic and is already close to 700,000 cases. More specifically, the Ministry of Public Health recorded 696,904 infections, of which 7,230 were confirmed in the last 24 hours.

On the last day they were also detected 85 deaths from the virus, bringing the total number of deaths since the start of the pandemic to 5,788. Currently, in addition, there are 120 critically ill patients and 280 critically ill.